Experian Gets a 360 Degree Customer View

Experian Powers Customer Insight with 50x Performance Increase

With 15,000+ employees and annual revenues exceeding $4 billion (USD), Experian is a global leader in credit reporting and marketing services. The company is comprised of four main business units: Credit Information Services, Decision Analytics, Business Information Services, and Marketing Services.

Overview

Experian Marketing Services (EMS) has built its business on the effective collection, analysis and use of data. EMS helps marketers connect with customers through relevant communications across a variety of channels, driven by advanced analytics on an extensive database of geographic, demographic, and lifestyle data.

Our Hadoop infrastructure has become a real transformational change. Deploying Cloudera allows us to process orders of magnitude more information through our systems, and that technological capability in combination with Experian’s expertise in bringing together data assets is driving new, real insights into tomorrow’s marketing environments.

Jeff Hassemer, VP of Product Strategy, Experian

Today’s consumers leave a digital trail of behaviors and preferences for marketers to leverage so they can enhance the customer experience. Experian’s clients have started asking for more frequent updates on consumers’ latest purchasing behaviors, online browsing patterns and social media activity so they can respond in real time. But the data exhaust from these digital channels is massive and requires a technological infrastructure that can accommodate rapid processing, large-scale storage, and flexible analysis of multi-structured data.

Meeting Client SLAs with 24x7 Reliability

Hadoop and HBase quickly surfaced as a natural fit for Experian’s needs, such as meeting client SLAs and having 24x7 reliability, so the organization invested in Cloudera Enterprise.

A few months of exploration into Hadoop translated into a production version of Experian’s Cross-Channel Identity Resolution (CCIR) engine: a linkage engine that is used to keep a persistent repository of client touch points.

Delivering Operational Efficiency at a Fraction of the Cost

Hadoop is delivering operational efficiency to Experian by accelerating processing performance by 50x. They can process 100 million records per hour with the new Hadoop environment, whereas they used to process 50 million matches per day. And the cost of their new infrastructure is only a fraction of the legacy environment.

Nobody is doing what we’re doing with Hadoop today, especially at this order of magnitude. Ours is the first data management platform of its kind that accepts data, links information together across an entire marketing ecosystem, and puts it into a usable format for a solid customer experience.